The Black Campbell

It’s true for comedy, for sports, for investing…timing, as they say is everything. It’s also true for running a game. It’s not something everyone does naturally, but it can be learned (and vice-versa…just look at any Quentin Tarantino movie since Pulp Fiction.) If you’re like most gamers, you have a limited time to play, and perhaps scheduling problems lend to irregular or long periods between games. This makes ever play session precious, time-wise. If you have five hours once a month to game, you have to know how to help move things along without being too heavy handed.

First, know what kind of game you’re running. Is it heavy on character interaction and social machinations like most of the Vampire LARPs I’ve seen? Is it action-packed pulp? Is is sweeping space opera? Some of these will necessarily require more aggressive pacing than others to serve the genre. Supernatural love triangles, political intriguing, LeCarre-style espionage stories are slow-paced and heavy on character interaction and biographical exposition. The people and their motivations are the plot. Pulp fiction — from westerns, to “air adventures” like Airboy, to hard boiled detective stories (and you can include Batman and The Shadow, and even James Bond in these), as well as their space opera descendants require that the plot be served first. The characters are often archetypes that might have weaknesses and quirks that make them unique or interesting (an archeologist that, for instance, is only really afraid of snakes, or a womanizing, hard-drinking, but mostly soulless killer on Her Majesty’s dole), but first and formost, it’s about getting to the bottom of the mystery, besting the evil superhero/empire/world-domination villain — preferably with a series of exciting action sequences in novel locales with a touch of romance thrown in for good measure. This tells you what kind of stories to tell with your time, and how best to structure them.

Second, know your schedule. Do you play every week? A more episodic style of play might be in order, where you can have intricate interwoven stories like you see over the last decade or so in television. You can be a bit more formless with the ultimately goal and slap it together at the end of the campaign (ala Lost), or you can have a definite end game, like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. If you play less often, you might want to consider each session a discrete storyline — a movie, rather than a TV series or a short story as opposed to a novel, where you can be much more in depth.

For example, if I’m running an espionage game that meets once a month for five or six hours, I would look at each game as a movie in a series, like the James Bond franchise. You have action and exposition in equal parts, and you have a definitive end game (say, stop the villain from crashing the stock market and destroying the economy or stopping a hit on an VIP.) If you’re running every week, you might want to structure it more as a television “series”, each “season” (a particular number of sessions/missions) having a specific goal, but tied into an overall story arc that might not be resolved until you end the campaign. This could be something similar to The Shield, where the story arc is the eventual fall of the characters, but season two is finding and robbing the Armenian money train. Each episode is a discrete story (say, find out who killed X), but with the money train job preparation always in the background, and the forces of justice closing in on you being that element that gets more and more immediate as you go to close out the game.

It it were supernatural intrigue/romance like the World of Darkness games, the obvious examples for the occasional game might be the WoD-inspired Underworld series (at least the first two…Kate Beckinsale…PVC…what was a I saying?) Maybe your clan is maneuvering to take over New Orleans or San Francisco from another group of vampires. Each session should have a particular goal to achieve. For the weekly, long-term game, you could go more True Blood or Vampire Diaries (which I haven’t seen, so I could be typing out my @$$, right now.) Space opera? It’s Star Wars vs. Babylon 5 here, at least stylistically.

That brings us to the session itself. How do you keep things running smoothly? (First, read the other two posts on the subject.) The main items are the same in any good storytelling, no matter the media: 1) Know what you want to accomplish, 2) Know what you want to happen on the way, 3) Know your [the players’] characters, 4) Know when to edit, 5) Know the strengths and limitations of the media [in this case the game mechanics] to get you there.

So, to begin: What do you want to accomplish? Simply put, what’s the point of the session/story? Say I’m running an pulp-style espionage game. The goal is for the characters to get from Point A to Point B, and there secure the objective. Maybe it’s rescue a person. Maybe, it’s find and bring back a priceless artifact, maybe it’s destroy a secret Nazi science base — it doesn’t matter — the objective is the point of the journey. They have to get from A to B and do the job in five to six hours of play. (I’m going to go with each session being a particular adventure for simplicity sake; for multiple session games, you still want to have the desire to finish the story in a certain number of sessions. [I prefer each story to take two to three nights.])

Now how do you get there? Introduce the necessary information and get them on their way in as timely a manner as possible. Many gamers have used the “you meet in a tavern” device, but for something like this, you could start in media res with an action sequence to get the flavor you want right away, then as you play, introduce why they’re here. Or give them a very basic “you were sent to [produce objective] but who knew that you would have run into opposition so quickly!?! A good rule of thumb for pacing during a night — every two hours of game play, due to interruptions, asides, dice rolling, etc. should equal about 30 minutes of movie/television screen time, based off of my experience. You have five to six hours, you should be able to do about the same amount of stuff as a full length feature film.

With that in mind, now you plan for what you want to happen during play. Keep in mind that the players may have other ideas for how to go about things and this may require you to abandon, or modify a scene “on the fly” to fit with their actions. Now, I’ve found a good balance is a major action or social test sequence every hour or so. So you have three to five big scenes for your movie, plus wrap up. These can be an action sequence (these tend to run the longest because o the amount of die rolling in most systems.) Maybe an exposition sequence where they question people for information through interrogation, schmoozing at the local casino, or a beating the pavement montage. Maybe it’s a bit of athleticism — mountain climbing to the objective, swimming through crocodile-infested waters, or slipping past the opposition. you can combine these elements, as well.

I’ve already posted on my technique of having three major locales or “sets” for a story, and that each has a particular action or social sequence tied to it. For our example, this might be a travel encounter — weather or other environmental issues, unrelated troubles with locals, or some kind of obstruction they must get past. Maybe they have to get to Point B by plane (set 1), but there’s trouble with the weather and the aircraft and they either having to find a way to push through or land safely(ish) in a location that leads to the next encounter. Now they are in (set 2) which requires them to slog through a jungle or desert or something requiring them to fight flora/fauna/natives or use their wits to survive. One at Set 3, they encounter the opposition for a requisite gunfight or chase that gets them more information than they knew. Maybe the objective has been already snagged by the opposition, or there’s another faction involved, or the McGuffin itself has a problem. Move to the next set piece for the final showdown with the bad guys and get/do the objective. Then get out safely after the opposition has been overcome.

Knowing your players and their characters tells you the kind of things that will interest them. If you have a pilot character, a gunslinger, a pugilist, and an archeologist, you know what to plan for — some kind of flying test, a gun fight, a fist fight, and some kind of exposition scene involving the McGuffin. Plan to give them each a scene doing their thing (at the very least.) If you know how they tend to react, you can set up the opposition to play to the weaknesses; overcoming obstacles and weaknesses is part of the fun. (Snakes…why’d it have to snakes?)

Now the tough part. Editing. Even successful storytellers screw this up from time to time. Look at Peter Jackson — yes, The Lord of the Rings was going to run long, but King Kong was interminable. Every scene ran that bit too long. “Wow, this spider pit scene is intense! I hope they get rescued soon! They should be getting rescued any second now…oh, for god’s sake, just friggin’ die!”

Just like you should hit one of your big scenes every hour or so, unless the point of the night is your battle to do X (like, say, destroy the resurrection ship in Battlestar Galactica, or hold Helm’s Deep or the equivalent in your fantasy game), your action sequences shouldn’t run more than half to two thirds of that time. Enough time to have fun and be challenged, not enough to bog down the story and drag out play. After all, like a movie director, you have a specific length of time to fill (unless your Peter Jackson or Quentin Tarantino — then you can ramble on for a period longer than Wagner’s Ring Cycle…)

Is the opposition too tough? Have them pull out for some reason and add why they did to a later scene or come up with some way to truncate the fight. Is the player getting too wrapped up in playing baccarat and not looking for his contact? Have the house pull the plug on his at the table for some reason. Is the character too busy seducing the girl/guy to get information? Get them laid and press on.

But what about the opposite problem — Crap! They killed that Nazi horde like they were an asteroid hitting the city! Now what? Maybe they have friends waiting outside. Maybe one of them booby-trapped the building — get out now!, Maybe they have an important clue that the characters can find and puzzle over. This is the tough one — how do you fill time, if the players are moving too quickly. You can make the next encounter harder, or stretch your time a bit on it; it’s never bad to end a bit early — you always have post success/failure character interaction and questions of experience or other mechanics to address.  Here’s a real tough one: They killed off the major villain in the first encounter instead of letting him escape so you can follow to the cool underground base fight at the end? There’s no clean answer — you have to improvise. You could always pull a Casino Royale and kill the “villain” only to find out he was just a pawn of  a bigger villain.

That brings us to the game mechanics and how they come into play with timing. Older systems broke combat out as a separate set of rules, as a consequence of their having stated as miniatures/wargaming rules. As a result, these systems — Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, James Bond, Hollow Earth Expedition, or early Cortex and many other rules sets focused more energy and time on fighting than other aspects of storytelling. Newer mechanics, like FATE or other more freeform games don’t view combat as different from other tasks. This makes your action sequences fly along fast, and require a bit more input from the players to describe what’s happening. For combat specific mechanics, the more crunchy, the slower the action. A good GM with a firm knowledge of the mechanics of something like GURPS ca make the action flow well, but for the inexperienced GM, this can lead to a lot of lag time while rules are consulted.

Keeping these questions in mind is key to good timing when running a game. Know what you want to do and where you want to end up at the end of the session, and know how long the mechanics might drag out a fight, chase sequence, or social scene when deciding how many of those kind of scene to include in a night.

Over the decades, I’ve had a chance to play with a few gamemasters here and there, and to observe a few more. One thing I noticed was that very few GMs understand pacing — how to keep a game running smoothly and quickly. Their games bogged down in full, but unproductive side chatter, characters meandering into side plots that didn’t involve their other characters or had little to do with the main story, or simply lacked a certain energy.  There are a few reasons for this. I’ve broken these down in to three rough issues: preparation, engagement, and timing.

In this post, we’ll deal with hardest and easiest to manage: engagement.

We’ll start a lack of engagement on the part of the gamemaster.

Here’s a pair of examples: I played in a Shadowrun campaign about 20 years ago that started off terribly and managed to improve long enough to finish a single adventure. The GM was an older gronard type gamer who, looking back on it, was probably in the very early stages of Alzheimers. He wanted to run the game, but once we were all sat at the table, he was barley involved –until the combat portion of the game. He even wandered off a few times to, we assumed, go to the bathroom, but once was found working on his project Porsche 911! He simply didn’t care and it was only through the active engagement of a few of the players we got through the mission.

So what was the issue here? The GM later said “It just wasn’t as much fun to run as i thought.” Fair enough…so what’s the fix? There are several. If someone else wants to pick up the GM responsibilities, you might have a campaign that can be brought to life. If no one wants the job, find another game. It’s play, not a job.

Another example of GM disengagement: A former friend was going to run the new Dr. Who game for myself and my wife. It took place on a spacecraft, was essentially a playtest of a module he was going to release, and revolved around a lost ship that had strange goings-on. Early on, I picked up on the rips from The Black Hole, but it was obvious that the GM wasn’t prepared, was uninterested in being there (for personal reasons that were obvious even at the time), and the night ended so unsatisfactorily that my wife stated, had I not run a solo adventure (a fast paced spy mission in Nazi Germany using Hollow Earth Expedition), she would have been turned off of gaming entirely.

Whats the fix? Don’t be badgered into running something you don’t want to, with people you don’t want to deal with. Beg off politely.

Most RPGs have a game master, the arbiter/facilitator/storyteller. If they’re not involved in the process, it doesn’t matter how much the players want to have fun, you will run aground.

But what about player engagement? What is throwing them off?

It could be their character — perhaps the initial concept sounded good, but just doesn’t carry through as the campaign goes on. An example: a player creates a Colonial Marine sergeant for a Battlestar Galactica group. The character does well in certain missions, but for the most part is a bit players because all the other characters are officers…no fraternization. Either the GM adjusts the stories to have more for the character to do, or the player builds another character.

It could be the setting. Maybe they’re just not into modern day espionage; they want to lay into monsters with a sword and become lord of all the land. You can either all agree to play something else, or the player can opt out of the spy game when it’s running. No harm, no foul. I’m not a fan of high fantasy and don’t play it. With the right GM and universe, I would consider it, the same way I enjoyed a recent one-shot zombie game on a cruise ship. (And I an SO over the zombie craze, but the set up was so good, it was worth trying.)

You could even tweak the setting to make it work. Let’s go back to the BSG example. The sergeant is pretty useless in a politics heavy set of adventures where the officers are locked in bureaucratic combat with their superiors over the Cylon menace…but once the shooting starts, he could be useful as a survivor on the surface of the Colonies.

But ultimately, if the players isn’t having a good time and it’s draggin down the rest of the group, they could decide to beg off.

Another issue with engagement is distraction. Not just environmental distractions (but we’ll address that), but distraction — not having your focus be on what you’re doing. Distraction on the part of the GM is probably the most likely to derail a game night or a campaign.

First — everyone has an off night. It’s not a disaster. If you’re overly tired, distracted by something going on at work or home, grieving, sick — it’s okay to call it a night early and either watch a movie, sit and socialize, or let the players do some light character bits together or plan for the big assault. Try again next session. The key point is to figure our what the distraction is and find a way to put that aside for the few hours you are playing. Once the distraction becomes so systemic to plan or run a game to your satisfaction — maybe you’re getting divorced, or you’ve developed a disliking for one of the players, or you’re too swamped  — hand the reigns off to someone else. Play instead of GM. Or take the time off you need. It’s play, not work.

Most of the above goes for players, as well, but the level of preparation and responsibility to driving the story is lessened for them If you want to have your character “sit in his cabin inventing until the action starts” (Yes, a player actually said that…see the GM from the first example.), that’s fine. Let them leaf through the rulebook and concentrate on the players who are actively engaged in the game. The wallflower will come forward as things that interest them come along. Maybe you’re feeling a little off or have had a bad day, but you want to socialize. It’s okay to tell the GM and players early on that you want your character in a minor role for the night. Roll some dice…maybe you’ll get into it; it’s okay if you don’t.

Once again, however, if the ennui is systemic, if you keep finding you are uninterested in the proceedings, figure out why and address that as you can. Is it the character? the setting? the game mechanics? Is it something environmental that needs to be addressed? Try and fix that.

The last distraction to be dealt with is the environmental one. Where, when, and how you play can be part of the problem with engagement. My group plays at my house on a week night. I also have a 22 month old daughter who loved people and wants to be involved in everything. The wife takes her out to do things until she’s tired, but even then we could be in for visitations from a curious child or crying from the other room because Mom won’t let her come socialize. This is distracting. It’s the job of a toddler. We have to watch the volume of the voices, we might have aural jamming from a crying kid — that can break the mood.

Is it too hot or cold, and what can you do about it? Is the place you’re playing filthy — some gamers I’ve played with really needed to fumigate and do a dish every once in a while — that can be off-putting. Is the significant other or roommates interrupting on a regular basis? Are you playing in a high-traffic zone like a game store, barracks lounge, or other public space? It might be time to change the venue, or the time you play. (I can only imagine these issues are magnified when gaming via Skype or other video/audio-conferencing.)

Engagement will never be uniform over time. Don’t sweat the off nights, but when your enjoyment of the game wanes for a period of time, it’s time to evaluate why? Is it time to swap GMs and/or games for a while, to keep it fresh? Is the venue to distracting? Is your life in the way? Figure out the proper corrective action, even if that action is to take a break.

Over the decades, I’ve had a chance to play with a few gamemasters here and there, and to observe a few more. One thing I noticed was that very few GMs understand pacing — how to keep a game running smoothly and quickly. Their games bogged down in full, but unproductive side chatter, characters meandering into side plots that didn’t involve their other characters or had little to do with the main story, or simply lacked a certain energy.  There are a few reasons for this. I’ve broken these down in to three rough issues: preparation, engagement, and timing.

In this post, we’ll deal with the first — preparation.

First and foremost: have a working knowledge of the rules you are using, know where the tables and rules you will need are in the rulebook, and be ready to ignore the rules if you will slow play looking for how, say, that grenades damage fall over over what distance. Just make a ruling and go.

There’s been a host of gaming blogs that have been playing down the importance of preparation in favor of improvisation. I’m just going to get to the point: many of them are wrong. Preparation is essential to success in all thing, but the trick is the right amount of preparation. That doesn’t mean improvisation isn’t important or doesn’t have it’s place. As a military turism goes, “A plan never survives contact with the enemy…” and a game plot never survives (fully) the involvement of your players.

That’s kinda the point. You are all working together to tell a story, but as with a military unit, a software development team, or a bunch of guys working at a fast food restaurant, you need an objective and at least some kind of leadership — even a collaborative one.

A quick bit of history to place my comments properly: Most RPG systems have a game master and players. The GM prepares some kind of basic plot or objective which the players attempt to achieve. In early RPGs, the GM was an actively antagonistic force, working against the players. Later, this evolved into a more collaborative role, working with the players to run through a story as more of a facilitator or “storyteller”, to use the White Wolf term. Most recently, GM-less or collaborative storytelling games remove the hierarchical nature of GM/player and everyone gets to work together, perhaps with some sort of facilitator (or GM) to keep things moving. I’ve played in all and found that the best balance seems to fall in the middle — a GM with some level of fiat and control over the universe, but not an active antagonistic force. You may feel differently.

The trick is the right amont of preparation. Too little preparation — what I link to “sandboxing”, or letting the players wander about a gaming environment looking for something to do — has intrinsic problems of pacing. It is player controlled, and that means multiple people with differing points of interest. This leads to parties being split in ways that are not always conducive to achieving the supposed point of the mission. It also tends to favor the more powerful personalities in the party, as they can suck all the air out of the room and focus all the attention on their characters.

Too little preparation also means that when players do the unexpected (and they will), you have to improvise. If you’re good at this, no issues; if you are not, something as simple as “what’s the barkeep’s name” can create a blip in the flow of play. (One of my ways around this is to say something like “he’s credited as ‘barkeep’ in the credits.”) If you are involved in a combat sequence, you might want to have a good metal image of the field of play so you can map on the fly, if you don’t do it ahead of time. Nothing slows play like “I can’t visualize this — can you explain the situation again?” Or worse — you have no real plot, villain, or story and are just leaving it to the players to come up with something. There’s only so much manly carousing at a pub that players will want to do.

Another problem is too much preparation. The kitchen sink style of prep leads to GMs wanting to use every little bit of the campaign world they’ve created. It can mean asides and distractions from the action that are unnecessary to the plot line and bog down play.

Here’s a few examples: You join a D&D campaign that’s been in play for a few years, or which is just firing up but the GM has been crafting his world for the three years he had no players…it’s a beautifully realized world with an 80-page campaign bible you should read when you get a chance… 1) No one cares what happened 90 years ago in the Kingdom of Bratwurst unless it has direct import on the mission, so 2) if you don’t need it, don’t show it. An example: does it matter what King Louis XVI was doing before he got the chop when you are fighting Wellington at Waterloo? No — other than he and the royals are nasty sots and you hate ’em. Hell, how many people know what happened 10 years ago, much less 100…if you’re in a fantasy campaign, chances are your characters aren’t too well educated.

Worse, all that preparation — the big action scene in the abandoned iron works, the fight on the volcano planet, etc. — that all might be for naught if the heroes either ignore the plot entirely, or find a way to sort things before you get to your big denouement. Maybe they’ve found a way to get the bad guy on the way to his secret base in some Ronin-style hit on the city streets. Roll with it. Improvise the scene and let the players help.

One fo the best things about gaming is the collaborative process. You know, as GM, what has to happen for the game to play out. Say it’s the players need to get the McGuffin from the bad guys. You wanted to happen at point D, but the players have jumped the gun and with good planning and an annoying number of very good rolls are going to hit the villain an hour earlier in the night at point B. Let ’em do it, and let them tell you want they’re going to do. Now you know their plans. If they’re going to be too efficient, trip them up somehow. Maybe the car is armored. Maybe the guy isn’t there or offloaded the McGuffin. Maybe there’s a chase car with mooks.

Listen to their expectations of what should go down and give them just enough of what they want to make them entertained, but don’t make it so easy they don’t feel challenged.

You can sum it up this way: Keep it Simple Stupid.

Which I did not for this piece.